12.02.2010

• The Catholic League, an extreme-right group that frequently targets artists over the content of their work, has succeeded in getting the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery to remove a work by the late multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 from AIDS, for an 11-second clip depicting ants crawling on a crucifix on the ground. Calling the work "hate speech," the group claimed the piece was "designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians," despite the fact that the artist, as Blake Gopnik writes, hoped "the passage would speak to the suffering of his dead friend." He continues: "The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind."

• More congrats go to: Doryun Chong, MOMA Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture (and former Walker curator) for winning Independent Curators International's first-ever Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Award for "his multiple, global understanding of artworks and their contexts, and the recent exhibitions he has curated and co-curated in a range of venues nationally and internationally." He'll be honored along with PERFORMA director RoseLee Goldberg, who won ICI's Agnes Gund Curatorial Award for outstanding achievements in the field, at the group's 35th anniversary event Dec. 9.